Youtube

Skill axoviq-ai/synthadoc/synthadoc/skills/youtube

Synthadoc: An open-source LLM knowledge compilation engine that turns raw documents into structured, local-first wikis. A transparent, human-readable alternative to traditional RAG, which can be self-managed and self-improved without the use of any tools.

Install

npx -y skills add axoviq-ai/synthadoc --skill youtube

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What its author says it does

Copied from the file, not written here

Extract transcripts from YouTube videos via the YouTube caption system

The file declares its own license as AGPL-3.0-or-later. That is the author’s claim about this one file, and it is not the same thing as the license GitHub reports for the repository, which is listed with the other numbers below.

SKILL.md

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YouTube Skill

Extracts the transcript (captions) from a YouTube video using the YouTube caption system — no API key or audio download required. Optionally uses a vision-capable LLM to produce a structured summary (Overview, Topics, Key takeaways) before the raw transcript.

Setup

pip install youtube-transcript-api

Standalone usage

Transcript only (no LLM required):

import asyncio
from synthadoc.skills.youtube.scripts.main import YoutubeSkill

skill = YoutubeSkill()          # no provider — returns raw timestamped transcript

async def main():
    result = await skill.extract("https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ")
    print(result.text)          # "[0:00] text [0:04] text ..."
    print(result.metadata)      # {"video_id": "...", "title": "...", "url": "..."}

asyncio.run(main())

With LLM summarization (pass any provider that implements complete()):

skill = YoutubeSkill(provider=my_provider)
result = await skill.extract(url)
# result.text contains:
#   ## Executive Summary
#   <Overview / Topics / Key takeaways>
#
#   ## Transcript
#   [0:00] ...

The provider must implement:

async def complete(messages, system=None, temperature=0.0, max_tokens=4096)
    -> object with .text (str), .input_tokens (int), .output_tokens (int)

Message (used to build the messages list) is importable from synthadoc.skills.base:

from synthadoc.skills.base import Message

When this skill is used

Source starts with https://www.youtube.com/, https://youtu.be/, or https://www.youtubekids.com/

To search YouTube by topic instead of ingesting a specific URL, use the web search skill — it filters Tavily results to YouTube domains automatically:

synthadoc ingest "youtube Moore's Law"
synthadoc ingest "youtube kids: Sesame Street"
synthadoc ingest "search for youtube: history of computing"

Limitations

Only works for videos that have captions (auto-generated or manually added). If no captions are available the source is skipped with a warning.
Private or deleted videos are skipped gracefully.